I dont know what the intent of the dev team is on this particular issue but I would have to say i would see it as quite an essential thing to include in the game because of what was accomplished with IG2 when it came to design our own ships with various different setups. An idea on this would be to design the customization system (if there is one) around every system being modular and dynamic, so when you add certain things to the ship designs, depending on what you change, will physically change the look of the ship itself. Adding bigger engines will change the look of the engines completely, depending what sort of kitten you choose or hull, which change from perhaps being a more industrial cargo-ship like hull to more of a battlecruiser hull, each hull giving you specific features, like, one hull is perhaps more heavy on the gun control which enables you to load more turret slots, where as a friggate class hull might give you more missile slots, enabling several different hulls for each class of ship. Having everything modular would make it easy to customize ships and give more individuality to fleets.